Vsevolod Kapatsinski

Frequency of use leads to automaticity of production: evidence from repair in conversation.

In spontaneous speech, speakers sometimes replace a word they have just produced or started producing by another word. The present study reports that in these replacement repairs, low-frequency replaced words are more likely to be interrupted prior to completion than high-frequency words, providing support to the hypothesis that the production of high-frequency words is more automatic than the production of low-frequency words (Bybee, 2002; Logan, 1982). Frequency appears to have an effect on interruptibility even when word duration is statistically controlled. In addition, the frequency of the replaced word is positively correlated with the frequency of the word it is replaced by, supporting the hypothesis that high-frequency words are easier to access in production (Kittredge, Dell, Verkuilen, & Schwartz, 2008): vkapatsi@uoregon.edu the more frequent the target, the more frequent an inappropriate word needs to be to overcome the target and be uttered, only to be replaced.

Perceptual functionality of morphological redundancy in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara)

A recent cross-linguistic survey suggests redundant marking of the same meaning by multiple morphological markers to be more widely attested than commonly believed. While this phenomenon (referred to as multiple (or extended) exponence in the morphological literature) has been examined within the context of morphological theory and diachronic research, little work has investigated the processing of morphological redundancy and synchronic motivations for its use. This paper reports a field speech-in-noise experiment to assess perceptual functionality of redundant markers in an agglutinating, morphologically complex language of Northern Mexico, Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara). This language possesses morphological patterns in which a meaning is redundantly cued by two consecutive suffixes, and where the second (outer) suffix is optional. We show that the effect of adding the optional suffix varies with the overall likelihood of recognising its meaning in context: cue redundancy helps when recognition of the cued meaning is difficult but hurts when recognition of the cued meaning is easy. The results are interpreted as support for the operation of Grices Maxim of Clarity in spoken word recognition and/or production: the listener expects the speaker to say only as much as is necessary to transmit the message.

Putting old tools to novel uses: The role of form accessibility in semantic extension

An increase in frequency of a form has been argued to result in semantic extension (Bybee, 2003; Zipf, 1949). Yet, research on the acquisition of lexical semantics suggests that a form that frequently co-occurs with a meaning gets restricted to that meaning (Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007). The current work reconciles these positions by showing that - through its effect on form accessibility - frequency causes semantic extension in production, while at the same time causing entrenchment in comprehension. Repeatedly experiencing a form paired with a specific meaning makes one more likely to re-use the form to express related meanings, while also increasing ones confidence that the form is never used to express those meanings. Recurrent pathways of semantic change are argued to result from a tug of war between the production-side pressure to reuse easily accessible forms and the comprehension-side confidence that one has seen all possible uses of a frequent form.

Evaluating Logistic Mixed-Effects Models of Corpus-Linguistic Data in Light of Lexical Diffusion

We explore methods for evaluating logistic mixed-effects models of both corpus and experimental data types through simulations. We suggest that the fit of the model should be evaluated by examining the variance explained by the fixed effects alone, rather than both fixed and random effects put together. Nonetheless, for corpus data, in which frequent items contribute more observations, coefficient estimates for fixed effects should be derived from a model that includes the random effects. Including random effects in the model with such datasets allows for better estimates of the fixed-effects predictor coefficients. Not having random effects in the model can cause fixed-effects coefficients to be overly influenced by frequent items, which are often exceptional in linguistic data due to lexical diffusion of ongoing changes.

Distributional learning is error-driven: the role of surprise in the acquisition of phonetic categories

Abstract Much previous research on distributional learning and phonetic categorization assumes that categories are either faithful reproductions or parametric summaries of experienced frequency distributions, acquired through a Hebbian learning process in which every experience contributes equally to the category representation. We suggest that category representations may instead be formed via error-driven predictive learning. Rather than passively storing tagged category exemplars or updating parametric summaries of token counts, learners actively anticipate upcoming events and update their beliefs in proportion to how surprising/unexpected these events turn out to be. As a result, rare category members exert a disproportionate influence on the category representation. We present evidence for this hypothesis from a distributional learning experiment on acquiring a novel phonetic category, and show that the results are well described by a classic error-driven learning model (Rescorla, R. A. & A. R. Wagner. 1972. A theory of Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. In A. H. Black & W. F. Prokasy (eds.), Classical conditioning II: Current research and theory, 64–99. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts).

Lay Listener Classification and Evaluation of Typical and Atypical Children’s Speech

Verbal children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often also have atypical speech. In the context of the many challenges associated with ASD, do speech sound pattern differences really matter? The current study addressed this question. Structured spontaneous speech was elicited from 34 children: 17 with ASD, whose clinicians reported unusual speech prosody; and 17 typically-developing, age-matched controls. Multiword utterances were excerpted from each child’s speech sample and presented to young adult listeners, who had no clinical training or experience. In Experiment 1, listeners classified band pass filtered and unaltered excerpts as “typical” or “disordered”. Children with ASD were only distinguished from typical children based on unaltered speech, but the analyses indicated unique contributions from speech sound patterns. In Experiment 2, listeners provided likeability ratings on the filtered and unaltered excerpts. Again, lay listeners only distinguished children with ASD from their typically-developing peers based on unaltered speech, with typical children rated as more likeable than children with ASD. In Experiment 3, listeners evaluated the unaltered speech along several perceptual dimensions. High overlap between the dimensions of articulation, clearness, and fluency was captured by an emergent dimension: intelligibility. This dimension predicted listeners’ likeability ratings nearly as well as it predicted their judgments of disorder. Overall, the results show that lay listeners can distinguish atypical from typical children outside the social-interactional context based solely on speech, and that they attend to speech intelligibility to do this. Poor intelligibility also contributes to listeners’ negative social evaluation of children, and so merits assessment and remediation.

An Anglo-Americanism in Slavic morphosyntax: Productive [N[N]] constructions in Bulgarian

Abstract Since 1990, most of the South and East Slavic languages have independently adopted, to varying extents, English loanblend [N[N]] constructions, in which an English modifier noun is followed by a head noun that previously existed in the language, for example, Bulgarian ekšŭn geroi ‘action heroes’. This phenomenon is of particular interest from a morphosyntactic processing perspective, because the use of the English noun as a modifier without the addition of a Slavic adjectival suffix and agreement desinence is a violation of fundamental traditional principles of Slavic morphology and morphosyntax, and thus should pose considerable parsing challenges. Bulgarian has incorporated English loanblend [N[N]]’s particularly well into the standard language. In this article we argue that the high frequency, broad semantic range, and productivity of loanblend [N[N]]’s in Bulgarian are the direct result not of Bulgarian’s analytic case-marking system per se, but of preexisting construction types in the language

Modeling the listener? What resets acoustic durations of repeated English words

Listener-based accounts of speech production claim that speakers modify their speech based on their evaluation of the listener’s state of knowledge (Lindblom, 1990). In line with this, repeated words shorten when they have been previously said to the same listener (Fowler, 1988); however, repetition across an episode boundary in a narrative does not lead to decreased acoustic duration (Fowler et al., 1997). We replicate Fowler et al.’s story boundary effect and extend the study by testing whether a switch in listener has an additional effect on word duration. Speakers were asked to tell and retell the same story in the sequence of (A) listener 1/(B) listener2/(C) listener1 again (Galati and Brennan, 2010). We expect word durations to reset when the speaker starts a new narrative, especially when there is a switch in listener. In other words, word durations should be comparable in conditions (A) and (B), but shorter in (C), since the listener in condition (C) has heard the story before. Acoustic data from ...

What is it I am writing? Lexical frequency effects in spelling Russian prefixes: Uncertainty and competition in an apparently regular system*

Abstract Whole-word frequency effects are shown to exist in what appears to be a completely regular system, the spelling of prefix-final /z/ in Russian. Russian prefixes that underlyingly end in /z/ (roz-, bez-, iz-) end in [s] on the surface when followed by a voiceless consonant. According to the rules of Russian orthography, the surface form, rather than the underlying form, must be reflected in the spelling. However, spelling errors reflecting the underlying form often occur, especially for the prefix bez-. The present paper reports that the error rate, either in natural typing on the web or in a classroom dictation task, for a given word is negatively correlated with the frequency of the word, suggesting that Russian writers rely, to a significant extent, on memory of complete orthographic forms as opposed to the orthographic rule. The frequency effect holds even within the set of regular inflectional variants of a single lexeme, with more frequent wordforms showing lower error rates. The evidence demonstrates a high degree of reliance on whole-form lexical retrieval even in what appears to be a regular system that is explicitly taught to the writers throughout their schooling in a morphologically rich language and thus provides support for the use of lexical retrieval even when it is not necessary (Baayen et al., Dutch inflection: The rules that prove the exception, Kluwer, 2002, Butterworth, Lexical representation, Academic Press, 1983, Bybee, Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form, John Benjamins, 1985, The phonology of the lexicon: Evidence from lexical diffusion, CSLI, 2000, vs. DiSciullo and Williams, On the definition of word, MIT Press, 1987, Pinker, Science 253: 530–535, 1991). However, reliance on retrieval is argued to be especially strong when there is a relatively long period of temporary uncertainty regarding which rule is applicable during processing (see also Albright, Lexical and morphological conditioning of paradigm gaps, Equinox, 2009, Barca et al., Reading and Writing 20: 495–509, 2007, Burani et al., Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 13: 346–352, 2006). The importance of temporary uncertainty and resulting rule competition suggests that the regular/irregular distinction needs to be reconsidered as even fully “regular” systems may feature rule competition due to temporary uncertainties about rule applicability. Reliance on retrieval may go largely undetected in Russian during schooling because teaching and test materials focus on the spelling of frequent words, which can be either produced by rule or retrieved as wholes. The largely complementary methodological challenges in studying lexical frequency effects in corpus and experimental data are discussed.

Learning Morphological Constructions

The great variability of morphological structure across languages makes it uncontroversial that morphology is learned. Yet, morphology presents formidable learning challenges, on par with those of syntax. This article takes a constructionist perspective in assuming that morphological constructions are a major outcome of the learning process. However, the existence of morphological paradigms in many languages suggests that they are often not the only outcome. The article reviews domain-general approaches to achieving this outcome. The primary focus is on mechanisms proposed within the associative/connectionist tradition, which are compared with Bayesian approaches. The issues discussed include the role of prediction and prediction error in learning, generative vs. discriminative learning models, directionality of associations, the roles of (unexpectedly) present vs. absent stimuli, general-to-specific vs. specific-to-general learning, and the roles of type and token frequency. In the process, the notion of a construction itself is shown to be more complicated that it first appears.